During an appearance on the Thursday night edition of MSNBC’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki,” Rachel Maddow spoke on the importance and power of economic boycotts in combating the Trump administration.
Maddow noted at the top of her remarks, first reported in a video shared by Mediaite, that there have been “organized boycotts” that have worked in President Trump’s favor this year. “We’ve seen that, for example, around corporations repealing their DEI policies,” Maddow explained. “There’s been some organized boycotts along those lines this year since Trump has been pressuring corporations to do that.”
The “Rachel Maddow Show” host pointed, however, to the fallout of Jimmy Kimmel’s brief suspension by ABC and Disney as proof of the power American consumers have in the battle against authoritarianism. In the wake of Kimmel’s suspension, there were mass calls among consumers to cancel their Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions, and many did exactly that.
“Look at the Kimmel fiasco, right? [FCC Chairman] Brendan Carr and the Trump administration eventually proclaimed they had not done all the things that they had done to try to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air for being a Trump critic,” Maddow said. “But that was only after the institutions, the public-facing and for-profit institutions, they were trying to act through were pressured by the American people into changing their minds.”
“When ABC and Disney and Nexstar and Sinclair hear from their own customers and hear from the American people about what they’re doing, those organizations, even right-wing organizations like Sinclair, are very sensitive to public feedback and to consumer feedback,” Maddow said.
Expounding on her previous point, Maddow remarked that public companies are not as insulated from criticism or consumer backlash as Trump and some of his cabinet members. “All the institutions that they’re trying to work through to get the kind of authoritarian transformation that they want in this country, a lot of those institutions are public-facing and are very sensitive,” Maddow observed.
“That kind of economic pressure can really, really make a difference,” the MSNBC anchor continued. “Every company that thinks about, you know, giving Trump a gold statue or taking down ICEBlock-style apps out of their App Store or any of these other things that the tech companies and these other corporations are doing. Any company [that] wants to do stuff like that should know that they’re going to hear from the American people about it.”
Maddow added, “I think those repercussions will continue and escalate as Trump gets more and more unpopular, as he gets more and more radical.”
